Bitcoin 0.13.0 Binary Safety Warning 17 August 2016
Summary
Bitcoin.org has reason to suspect that the binaries for the upcoming Bitcoin Core release will likely be targeted by state sponsored attackers. As a website, Bitcoin.org does not have the technical resources to guarantee that we can defend ourselves from attackers of this calibre. We ask the Bitcoin community, and in particular the Chinese Bitcoin community to be extra vigilant when downloading binaries from our website.
In such a situation, not being careful before you download binaries could cause you to lose all your coins. This malicious software might also cause your computer to participate in attacks against the Bitcoin network. We believe Chinese services such as pools and exchanges are most at risk here due to the origin of the attackers.
Mitigation
The hashes of Bitcoin Core binaries are cryptographically signed with this key belonging to Bitcoin Core maintainer Wladimir J. van der Laan. Additional signatures from other developers can be found in the gitian signatures repository.
We strongly recommend that you download Wladimir’s key from multiple sources in addition to Bitcoin.org for comparison purposes. For example, you can cross reference Bitcoin.org’s copy with the bitcoin-dev mailing list where Wladimir signed a message containing the key’s fingerprint (01EA5486DE18A882D4C2684590C8019E36C2E964), but we encourage you to seek out other sources as well in order to make sure you are verifying your download with the correct key. Furthermore, we recommend verifying your download using signatures from multiple developers using the gitian signatures repository.
It is always best practice to securely verify multiple signatures and hashes before running any Bitcoin Core binaries. This is the safest and most secure way to ensure that the binaries you’re running are the same ones created by the Core Developers.